Philly Police Department press release via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News. Click to enlarge.

Two more Philadelphians bit the dust yesterday, but if The Philadelphia Inquirer was your only news source, you’d never know it. Nine people bled out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets over the last five days, but the “anti-racist news organization” won’t tell you anything. In December of 2020, columnist Heleb Ubiñas wrote, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” A year and a half later, the Inquirer, under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar, don’t want you to know that anyone was killed.

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. The Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer rank only 17^th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

The numbers are stark. At the end of Thursday, May 12, the city was seeing 1.295 homicides per day. Five days later, that’s up to 1.314 per day. More importantly, the City of Brotherly Love has gone from a projected 503 homicides in 2022 to 514.^[1]Methodology: to compensate for the normal increase in homicides as warmer weather approaches, I have taken the number of homicides on a given date, divided it by the number on the same day in 2021, … Continue reading

So, if the newspaper does not report on homicides in its own home city, on what does it report? How about his gem?

How the Buffalo mass shooting raises the stress and trauma of Black Philadelphians

When an entire community is targeted, the fear and trauma mounts, studies show.

by Abraham Gutman | Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Incidents of violence against Black people have made it into the therapy sessions Charlotte Andrews holds in Elkins Park — no matter where they’d happened in the nation.

“I noticed that there’s a significant amount of anxiety, fear, anger,” said the therapist, recalling the emotions Black patients expressed after police killings, such as the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “People bring it with them. People are carrying it with them.”

When an entire community is targeted, the fear and trauma mount.

On Saturday, a white 18-year-old man entered a supermarket in Buffalo and opened fire, killing 10 people and wounding three. Eleven of the victims were Black. Authorities said Payton Gendron drove about 200 miles from his hometown of Conklin, N.Y., to target a Tops Friendly Markets in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He livestreamed the massacre and left behind a 180-page manifesto that includes references to Great Replacement Theory and other white-supremacist ideologies.

The FBI is investigating the mass shooting “as a hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism.”

“That’s the fear — that we are not done,” said Andrews, who is also the clinical coordinator and supervisor of Black Men Heal, a Philly-area mental health nonprofit providing services to men of color in eight states. “This can happen anywhere, and it can happen any time. That’s what I see showing up in therapy.”

There’s more at the original.

But it’s really mind boggling when you think about it: 562 Philadelphians were murdered last year, the vast majority of them being young black males, and the thing that worries the black community in Philly is a targeted, but rare mass murder in Buffalo? As we reported yesterday, according to the city’s shootings database there had been 775 shootings as of May 15^th.^[2]The same database reports ten shootings on May 16th, in which eight of the victims were black males, and two fatalities, both homicide victims being black males. The database had not been updated to … Continue reading That works out to 5.74 shootings per day in Philly, or one Buffalo — 13 people were shot in the Buffalo massacre — every 2¼ days.

This is the kind of journolism^[3]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading we get from the Inky, an attempt to blame things on one 18-year-old deranged white guy, when the shootings are happening every single day in the city. Just because the newspaper, which once had “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People” on its masthead, doesn’t report on them doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen, or that the public do not know it.

Though the Inquirer has referred to Philadelphia as a “black city”, the  2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone. If white residents do not see crime as the most serious problem, the way black and Hispanic Philadelphians do, much of that can be attributed to the fact that, while the city’s overall population are quite “diverse” — a word I’ve come to despise — internally the city is highly segregated.

In being highly segregated, white residents can afford to see crime as a less serious problem, because crime hits white residents far less frequently. The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and there were four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.^[4]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 149 results!^[5]The Inquirer’s website has been seriously scrubbed: the same search several months ago returned 4855 returns. Most of those returns were from the older philly.com, and not the current … Continue reading But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning unless you know where to dig, if even that much.

The very #woke^[6]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar, does not want you to know about the daily bloodbath in the city’s streets. Instead, the publisher, the editor, and probably much of the staff want you to believe that the greatest threat of sudden death in the black community comes from a radical fringe of white mass killers, rather than from inside the community themselves. It suits their political agenda, but it has nothing to do with the truth.